The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  Again, it is my rule that I don’t go to the house unless he is there.

  “How is that chest of yours?”

  I gave a small cough and he gave me a dominating look. He likes to worry about my health.

  “The best thing your uncle ever did for you was to get you out of the city. You needed an open-air life.”

  Duggie, who has had to make his own way, rather admires me for having had a rich uncle.

  Was he shooting a barb into me? I don’t think so. We always have this conversation: he was born to repeat himself—one more sign of his honourableness.

  Duggie takes pride in a possessive knowledge of my career. He often says to Sally, “He ought to put on weight—white hair at his age—but what do you expect? Jazz bands in Paris and London, hanging round Chelsea bars, playing at all that literary stuff, going into that bank—all that sort of nonsense.” Then he goes on, “Mother’s boy—marrying a woman twelve years older than himself. Sad that she died,” he adds. “Must have done something to him—that breakdown, a year in the sanatorium, he probably gambled. Still, the Nursery has pulled him together. Characteristic, of course, that most of the staff are girls.”

  “It’s doing well,” he said in a loud confidential voice, nodding at the fig tree by the south wall, close to us.

  “What a lovely tree,” Mother said. “Does it bear? My husband will only eat figs fresh from the tree.”

  “One or two little ones. But they turn yellow and drop off in June,” said Sally.

  “What it needs,” Duggie said, “is the Mediterranean sun. It ought to be in Turkey, that is where you get the best figs.”

  “The sun isn’t enough. The fig needs good drainage and has to be fertilised,” Mother said.

  “All fruit needs that,” said Duggie.

  “The fig needs two flies—the Blastophaga and, let me see, is it the Sycophaga? I think so—anyway, they are Hymenoptera,” Mother said.

  Duggie gazed with admiration at my mother. He loves experts. He had been begging me for years to bring her over to his house.

  “Well, we saved its life, didn’t we, Teddy?” he said to me and boasted on his behalf and mine. “We flagged the area. There was nothing but a lake of muddy water here. How many years ago was that?”

  “Four or five,” I said.

  “No!” said Duggie. “Only three.”

  Was he coming into the open at last and telling me that he knew that this was the time when Sally and I became lovers? I think not. The stare dropped out of his face. His honourable look returned.

  Sally and Duggie were what I call “Monday people” at the Nursery. There is a rush of customers on the weekend. They are the instant gardeners who drive in, especially in the spring and autumn, to buy everything, from plants already in bud and flowers, the potted plants, for balconies of flats. The crowd swarms and our girls are busy at the counter we had to install to save costs as the business grew. (The counter was Duggie’s idea: he could not resist seeing the Nursery as one of his colonies.) But on Monday the few fanatic gardeners come, and I first became aware of Sally because she was very early, usually alone, a slight woman in her late thirties with her straw-blond hair drawn back from a high forehead in those days, a severe look of polite, silent impatience which would turn into a wide, fastidious grimace like the yawn of a cat if anyone spoke to her. She would take a short step back and consider one’s voice. She looked almost reckless and younger when she put on glasses to read what was on the sacks and packets of soil, compost, and fertiliser in the store next to the office, happiest in our warm greenhouses, a woman best seen under glass. Her eyebrows were softer, more downily intimate than anything else about her. They reminded me when I first saw her of the disturbing eyebrows of an aunt of mine which used to make me blush when I was a boy. Hair disturbs me.

  One day she brought Duggie to the Nursery when I was unloading boxes of plants that came from the growers and I heard her snap at him, “Wait here. If you see the manager, ask about grass seed and stop following me round. You fuss me.”

  For the next half-hour she looked round the seedlings or went into the greenhouses while Duggie stood where he was told to stand. I was near him when the lorry drove off.

  “Are you being attended to?” I said. “I’ll call a girl.”

  He was in his suspended state. “No, I was thinking,” he said in the lazy voice of a man who, home from abroad and with nothing to do, was hoping to find out if there were any fellow thinkers about. “I was thinking, vegetation is a curious thing,” he said with the predatory look of a man who had an interesting empire of subjects to offer. “I mean, one notices when one gets back to London there is more vegetation than brick. Trees,” he said. “Plants and shrubs, creeper, moss, ivy,” he went on, “grass, of course. Why this and not that? Climate, I suppose. You have laurels here, but no oleander, yet it’s all over the Mediterranean and Mexico. You get your fig or your castor-oil plant, but no banana, no ginkgo, no datura. The vine used to swarm in Elizabethan times, but rare now, but I hear they’re making wine again. It must be thin. The climate changed when the Romans cut down the forests.” For a moment he became a Roman and then drifted on, “Or the Normans. We all come down to grass in the end.”

  He looked at our greenhouses.

  “My job takes me away a lot. I spend half the year abroad,” he said. “Oil. Kuwait.”

  He nodded to the distant figure of his wife. She was bending over a bed of tobacco plants.

  “We spent our honeymoon in Yucatán,” he said with some modest pomp. He was one of those colonising talkers, talking over new territory.

  “But that is not the point,” he said. “We can’t get the right grass seed. She sows every year, but half of it dies by the time summer comes. Yet look at the Argentina pampas.” He was imposing another geography, some personal flora of his own, on my Nursery. Clearly not a gardener: a thinker at large.

  I gave him the usual advice. I took him to a shed to show him sacks of chemicals. His wife came back from the flower beds and found us. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” she said to him. “I told you to wait where you were.” She sounded to be an irritable woman.

  He said to me, in an aloof, conspiring way, ignoring her, “I suppose you wouldn’t have time to drop round and have a look at our lawn? I mean, in the next week or two—”

  “It will be too late by then,” she interrupted. “The grass will be dead. Come along,” and she made that grimace—a grimace that now struck me as a confidence, an off-hand intimation.

  He made an apologetic gesture to me and followed her obediently out of the Nursery.

  I often had a word or two with Sally when she came alone: grass seed seemed to be the couple’s obsession. She said it was his; he said it was hers. I was a kind of umpire to whom they appealed when we met.

  So one afternoon in November when I was delivering laurels to a neighbour of theirs down the street, I dropped in at their house.

  A fat young man was sitting sedately on a motorbike outside it, slowly taking off a fine pair of gauntlets. Sitting behind the screen of the machine, he might have been admiring himself at a dressing-table mirror. In his white crash helmet he looked like a doll, but one with a small black moustache.

  “Those lads get themselves up, don’t they?” I said to Duggie, who came to the door.

  “Our tenant,” Duggie said. “He has the flat in the basement. He uses the side entrance. Under our agreement he does not use the garden. That is reserved for ourselves. Come through—I had these iron steps put in so that my wife has strictly private access to the garden without our interfering with him or he with us. My wife would have preferred a young married couple, but as I pointed out, there would be children. One has to weigh one thing against another in this life—don’t you find?”

  We went down to the garden. Their trouble was plain. The trees were bare. Half of the place was lifeless soil, London-black and empty. The damp yellow leaves of the fig tree hung down like wretched rags, and
the rest had fallen flat as plates into a very large pool of muddy water that stretched from one side of the garden to the other. Overnight, in November, a fig collapses like some Victorian heroine. Here—as if she were about to drown herself. I said this to Duggie, who said, “Heroine? I don’t follow.”

  “You’ll never grow a lawn here. Too much shade. You could cut the trees down …”

  At this moment Sally came down and said, “I won’t have my trees cut down. It’s the water that’s killing everything.”

  I said that whole districts of London were floating on water. Springs everywhere, and the clay held it.

  “And also, the old Fleet River runs underground in this district,” I said. “The only thing you can do is to put paving down.”

  “The Fleet River? News to me,” said Duggie, and he looked about us at other gardens and houses as if eager to call out all his neighbours and tell them. “Pave it, you say? You mean with stones?”

  “What else?” said Sally curtly and walked away. The garden was hers.

  “But, my dear,” he called after her, “the point is—what stones? Portland? Limestone?”

  The coloniser of vegetation was also a collector of rock. A load of geology poured out of him. He ran through sandstone, millstone grit, until we moved on to the whinstone the Romans used on Hadrian’s Wall, went on to the marble quarries of Italy and came back to the low brick wall of their garden, which had been damaged during the war.

  Presently there was the howling and thumping of jazz music from the basement flat.

  “I told you that man has girls down there,” Sally said angrily to her husband. “He’s just come in. He’s turning the place into a discothèque. Tell him to stop—it’s intolerable.”

  And she looked coldly at me as if I too were a trespasser, the sort of man who would kick up a shindy with girls in a quiet house. I left. Not a happy pair.

  I sent him an estimate for paving part of the garden. Several months passed; there was no reply and his wife stopped coming to the Nursery. I thought they were abroad. Then in the spring Duggie came to the Nursery with his daughter, a schoolgirl, who went off to make up confidently to a van driver.

  Duggie watched her and then said to me, “About those paving stones. My wife has been ill. I had a cable and flew home.”

  “I hope it was not serious?”

  He studied me, considering whether to tell me the details, but evidently—and with that kind of reluctance which suggests all—changed his mind. “The iniquitous Rent Act,” he said disparagingly, “was at the bottom of it.”

  He gave an outline of the Act, with comments on rents in general. “Our tenant—that boy was impossible, every kind of impertinence. We tried to get rid of him but we couldn’t. The fellow took us to court.”

  “Did you get an order against him?” I asked.

  Duggie’s voice hurried. “No. Poor fellow was killed. Drove his motorbike head-on into a lorry, a girl with him too. Both killed. Horrible. Naturally, it upset my wife: she blames herself. Imagination,” he apologised. Duggie spoke of the imagination accusingly.

  “The man with the little black moustache?” I asked.

  “She wouldn’t have a married couple there,” he said.

  “I remember,” I said. “You mentioned it.”

  “Did I?” he said. He was cheered by my remembering that.

  “You see,” he said. “It was clearly laid down in the agreement that he was not to go into the garden under any pretext, but he did. However, that is not what I came about. We’re going to pave that place, as you suggested. It will take her mind off it all.” He nodded to the house. “By the way, you won’t say anything to her, will you? I’m away so much the garden is everything to her.”

  Shortly after this I took one of our men over to the house. Duggie was stirred at the end of the first day when he came home from his London office to see we had dug up a lot of brick rubble—chunks of the garden wall which had been knocked down by blast during the war. On the second day he came back early in the afternoon and stood watching. He was longing to get hold of my man’s pickaxe. The man put it down and I had turned around when I heard the dead sound of steel on stone and a shout of “Christ!” from Duggie. He had taken the pickaxe and brought it down hard on a large slab of concrete and was doubled up, gripping his wrists between his legs, in agony. Sally came to the balcony and then hurried down the steps. Her appearance had changed. She was plumper than she had been, there was no sign of illness, and she had done her hair in a new way: it was loosened and she often pushed it back from her cheeks.

  “You are a fool, Duggie,” she said.

  The man was shovelling earth clear of the slab of concrete, which tilted down deep into the earth.

  “It’s all right. It’s all right. Go away. I’m all right,” said Duggie.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “Bleeding air-raid shelter,” my gardener said. “There’s one or two left in the gardens round here. A gentleman down the road turned his into a lily pond.”

  He went on shovelling and dug a hole. The concrete ended in a tangle of wire and stone. It had been smashed. He kneeled down on the ground and said, “The end wall has caved in, full of wet muck.” He got up and said, disappointed, “No one in it. Saved some poor bloke’s life. If he copped it, he wouldn’t have known, anyway.”

  Sally made a face of horror at the gardener. “Those poor people,” she said. “Come indoors. What a fool you are, Duggie.”

  Duggie refused to go. Pain had put him in a trance: one could almost see bits of his mind travelling out of him as he called triumphantly to her, “Don’t you see what we’ve got, my dearest?” he cried, excitement driving out his pain. He was a man whose mind was stored with a number of exotic words: “We’ve got a cenote.”

  How often we were to hear that word in the next few days! For months after this he must have continued startling people with it in his office, on buses, men in clubs, whoever was sitting next to him in aircraft on his way to Kuwait.

  “What is a cenote?” I said, no doubt as they did.

  “It’s an underground cistern,” he said. “You remember Yucatán, Sally—all those forests, yet no water. No big rivers. You said, ‘How did the Mayas survive?’ The answer was that the Maya civilisation floated on underground cisterns.”

  Duggie turned to me, calling me Teddy for the first time. “I remember what you said about London floating on underground rivers—it’s been on my mind ever since you said it. Something was there at the back of my mind, some memory, I couldn’t get it. There it is: a cenote. That’s where your fig tree has been drinking, Sally. You plant your fig tree on a tank of water and the rubble drains it.

  “Sally and I saw dozens of cenotes, all sizes, some hundred feet deep on our honeymoon,” he confided to me.

  Sally’s eyes went hard.

  “The Mayans worshipped them: you can see why. Once a year the priests used to cut out the heart of a virgin and throw it into the water. Propitiation,” he said.

  “It’s an act for tourists at the nightclubs there,” said Sally drearily.

  “Yes,” Duggie explained to us and added to me, “Fake, of course.”

  Sally said, “Those poor people. I shall never go into this garden again.”

  In the next few days she did not come down while we turned the ruin into a foundation, and the following week Duggie superintended the laying of the stones. His right arm was in a sling.

  When the job was finished Duggie was proud of the wide circle of stones we had laid down.

  “You’ve turned my garden into a cemetery. I’ve seen it from the window,” Sally said.

  Duggie and I looked at each other: two men agreeing to share the unfair blame. She had been ill; we had done this job for her and it had made things worse.

  Imagination, as Duggie had said. Difficult for him. And I had thought of her as a calm, sensible woman.

  It happened at this time I had to go to the Town Hall about a contract for replant
ing one of the neglected squares in the borough, and while I was there and thinking of Duggie and Sally I tried to find out who had lived in their house and whether there was any record of air-raid casualties. I went from office to office and discovered nothing. Probably the wrong place to go to. Old cities are piled on layer after layer of unrecorded human lives and things. Then Duggie sent a cheque for our work, more promptly too than most of our customers do. I thought of my buried wife and the rot of the grave as I made out a receipt. It occurred to me that it would be decent to do something for Duggie. I was walking around the Nursery one morning when I saw a small strong magnolia, a plant three feet high and already in bud. It was risky to replant it at this time, but I bound it, packed it, and put it in a large tub and drove to their house one Saturday with it, to surprise them. Sally came to the door with a pen in her hand and looked put-out by my sudden call. I told her I had the plant in the van.

  “We didn’t order anything. My husband is in Kuwait—he would have told me. There must be a mistake.”

  The pen in her raised hand was like a funny hostile weapon, and seeing me smile at it, she lowered her hand.

  “It’s not an order. It’s a present. In the van,” I said. She looked unbelieving at the van and then back at me. In the awkward pause my mind gave an unintended leap. I forgot about Duggie.

  “For you,” I said. I seemed to sail away, off my feet.

  “For me?” she said. “Why for me?”

  I was astonished. Her face went as white as paper and I thought she was going to faint. She stood there, trembling. The pen dropped out of her hand to the floor and she turned round and bent to pick it up and stood up again with a flustered blush as if she had been caught doing something wrong.

  “You’re the gardener,” I said. “Come and look.”

  She did not move, so I started off down the few steps to the gate. She followed me and I saw her glance, as if calling for protection to the houses on either side of her own.